@george1421 thanks for continuing to provide such detailed information.

I believe the best way to learn is to do, so i am going to go shopping for an SSD (and perhaps some RAM to be safe). Once I have everything in place, I am going to do a test run on our machines as well as those of an associate just to see what happens when the network changes. Following this, I will check back with you if you don’t mind to go through the results.

Hello,
In my attempt to switch to HTTPS for the Fog server, I encountered the same issue of the keyboard being disabled in the iPXE menu. After several unsuccessful tests, I consulted Copilot. After reviewing all the scripts and .h files, it indicated that the issue stemmed from the size of the iPXE.efi file I was using. It was too large due to all the necessary modules for HTTPS, causing iPXE to deactivate the USB keyboard functionality during loading. Consequently, I opted for snponly.efi instead, and now the keyboard works perfectly.

I modified the script buildipxe.sh :

sed -i ‘s+#define USB_HCD_USBIO+//#define USB_HCD_USBIO+g’ config/usb.h
sed -i ‘s+#define USB_KEYBOARD+//#define USB_KEYBOARD+g’ config/usb.h
sed -i ‘s+//#define USB_EFI+#define USB_EFI+g’ config/usb.h

May I propose a change in the console.h : Could you set the keyboard map to “dynamic” instead of “us” ? That way we can easily set our language in default.ipxe

//#define KEYBOARD_MAP us // Default US keyboard map
#define KEYBOARD_MAP dynamic // Runtime selectable keyboard map

@Tom-Elliott is there a way to find out where its failing

i have the PCAP file if interested?

I found out what’s causing the problem. The HP BIOS somehow configured the hard disk as a RAID by default. Removing the RAID, and the machine will boot to Windows after iPXE instead of looping.
Thank you for your input.

tbh i am running fog on centos 7 so maybe its time to re install the OS to rocky 9.5 or ubuntu 24

what OS do you recommend?

Ok,

I finally figured this out. I know it’s not the best method, but I prefer this than having the wording “plain text” Here’s what I did in case someone needs to do the same.

I read that API tokens do not go well as a securestring. Here are some references:
https://jamesone111.wordpress.com/2020/04/10/transformers-for-powershell-parameters-which-take-secrets/, and https://github.com/Azure/azure-powershell/issues/25533.

So in order to get past this, I needed to create another variable as show below:

$testapi1 = [pscredential]::new(“token”,$yourtoken)

You’re basically adding the pscredential above like you’re going to setup a username, but you put something like “token” or any wording as a placeholder for the username, then put the token in.

Then after you define the header you do something like this: $testheader.add(fog-user-token’,$testapi1.GetNetworkCredential().password)

Again it’s not the best method, but I also read a way when you do read-host -aseecurestring and save your api there as a variable, you can dispose that variable so it doesn’t stay in memory.

$test.disposeof

If someone has any better ideas, please let me know as I’m always on here learning new things and want to share as well. This basically can be closed out.

any help?

@lucancurtismahoney First let me start with the yada-yada-yada. Imaging over wifi is not supported by the developers of FOG. Imaging over wifi has its use cases but also is not advised because wifi is a shared resource and your entire wifi network will suffer if you try to image over wifi. You would be better served to get a supported (by the manufacturer) usb ethernet adapter and pxe boot over that.

With that said it might be possible to image over wifi if FOS is configured in an (unsupported) way. It will require a custom FOS Linux kernel and some tweaks to the virtual hard drive to add in the needed bits to configure wifi.

Below is a FOG USB debug image that contains a modified bzImage and init.xz files. Use rufus to burn to a 1GB usb drive. The image is less than 500MB so don’t waste a large usb on this boot image.

Understand this boot image WILL NOT WORK out of the box. We will use this for debugging your network adapter. Many network adapters need specific drivers to work with a linux kernel. We will find out what that firmware is with this debug usb.

Use rufus to write the image file to the usb drive. Edit the grub.cfg file with notepad++ (not windows notepad) its located in the /boot/grub directory. At the top set the IP address of your fog server, and half way down the variable add in your wifi ssid and password. Remove the curly braces. Save the config file and then take it to your target computer. USB boot this image file on the target computer. You may see some error messages about networking, but that is expected. After a few screens you need to clear by pressing the enter key you will be dropped to a linux command prompt. See if you can see the wifi adapter with this command ip a s If you see something like wlXXXXX then the driver is loaded and you are done. If you only see the loop back (lo) adapter then continue. Key in the following command it will look through the startup messages for anything that mentions firmware. grep -i -e firmw /var/log/messages My bet is there will be a message from the intel wireless (iwlwifixxxxx) saying that it needs a specific firmware to load. Take a clear snapshot of the name of the firmware name with a mobile phone and post it here. I will patch the kernel with the required firmware and upload it with additional instructions.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1psCrPVzBTvlakLkCMvhdoScAEZp1CKE6/view?usp=drive_link

I think this is an issue envolving this kind of nic hardware (Intel I226-V). I opened an issue (18125) where I have some appliances for pfsense, they have got four NICs with this kind of hardware, and we are not getting successfull to deploy an image because it’s not processing authentication, even typíng correct user and password.

@MichaelPower said in FOG & iPXE Anywhere - issues from boot menu:

Just wondering if a working bzImage I can use that boots under Secure Boot?

The issue is exactly that. bzImage is not signed so the uefi firmware will not boot it. That is the root of the issue. You could self sign ipxe and bzImage but then you will need to update the certificates in each computer to include your self signed certificate. Its possible but it is quite a bit of work to get it all setup.